Although an active experimental artist throughout her time in New York during the ’50s and ’60s, Yayoi Kusama had been largely forgotten by the United States public after her return to Japan in the ’70s. That is, until her artwork began circulating across the US and globe again in the mid-’90s. One of these major retrospectives, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968, was co-organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art and The Japan Foundation, and travelled from Los Angeles to New York City and to Minneapolis.

Yayoi described this moment in her autobiography Infinity Net: “My exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery that year… won an AICA award. A review in Time Out said that ‘Kusama has kept out of sight, ensconcsed in her own infinite world, but now she’s back to reclaim her rightful place in the history of postmodernism…’ But the biggest highlight came in March 1998 when Love Forever opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. This grand retrospective cemented the reassessment of Kusama as a major avant-garde artist. It included some eighty pieces and had taken five years to compile.”

The exhibition catalogue of Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 includes essays by Lynn Zelevansky, Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Alexandra Munroe.  Click the link below for the full text.